Coprario was not the only influential figure the boy encountered at Hertford’s Wiltshire seats at Amesbury and Wulfall, for amongst frequent visitors was a young prince, Charles, who on the death of his highly cultivated elder brother Prince Henry in 1612, became Prince of Wales and heir to the British throne. Two years older than Lawes, Charles was also taking a keen interest in music and, like Seymour’s protégé, learning the viol. It is a likely and pleasing scenario to imagine the two youngsters joining in a viol consort together. When the prince came of age in 1617 he was enabled to establish a band of seventeen private musicians, some inherited from his brother, a number that had grown to twenty-four by the time of his accession in 1625. At some point (exact dating has not been established) both William and Henry Lawes joined Charles’s musicians, but we have to move on to 1635 to find William being granted the royal patent as a member of the king’s “Lutes and Voices”. We know next to nothing about the life of the Lawes brothers while they were attached to Charles I’s court. William would obviously have been involved not only in private chamber concerts given for the king, but also more public performances such as the sumptuous court masques given at Inigo Jones’ magnificent Banqueting House in Whitehall, providing a considerable body of music for both.

The outbreak of the Civil War brought such lavish court patronage of the arts to an abrupt halt, although the eighteenth-century historian Sir John Hawkins suggested that private music making continued to flourish after the court moved from London to the safety of Oxford, a claim more recently contested. Certainly William Lawes joined his sovereign in the university city, immediately enlisting in the army. He was appointed a commissary in the king’s personal lifeguards, a rank that in theory should have kept him out of harm’s way. Once again there are no records to provide specific information as to Lawes’ military service over the next three years, although his post would naturally imply that he was present at the fields of action involving Charles, including the Battle of Naseby on June 14 1645, the great turning point of the War. And so to that fateful September day, a day after which the king was left to mourn the death not only of his boyhood friend, but also the nobleman Bernard Stuart, Earl of Lichfield. The king’s reaction to the death of Lawes was famously recorded by Thomas Fuller in his History of the worthies of England (1662): “Nor was the King’s soul so ingrossed with grief for the death of so near a Kinsman, and Noble a Lord, but that hearing of the death of his deare servant William Lawes, he had a particular mourning for him when dead, whom he loved when living, and commonly called the Father of Musick”.

William Lawes’ death was mourned beyond the confines of court, inspiring numerous musical elegies from colleagues led by his own brother (Cease you jolly shepherds) and who include such composers as John Wilson, John Cobb, John Jenkins and John Hilton. But perhaps the most poignant epitaph of all is to be found in the words of the Royalist poet Robert Herrick, words set by Lawes in his most famous song: Gather ye Rosebuds while you may, / Old Time is still a flying / And that same Flow’r that smiles today, / Tomorrow will be dying.